lmfao

Rip. The problem of suffering is a tough one.

I've started a habit of meditating for a couple of months now. I usually mediate in my bedroom, with my windows open at times (I leave them open cuz I like to practice mindfulness against external sounds like the wind or birds). Whenever I meditate, I don't wear a shirt or any trousers. And I've found that most of the time when I meditate, I feel warmer, even when I leave the window open and the weather is cold (like around 7 degrees celcius or something). I end up sweating more the normal.

The "biggest thing" I've done with intuition is to derive some physics formulas myself, without looking up what they were. Most of the intuition I use is focused on doing maths for fun.

@How to be wise I suspect that psychedelics will get the job done, at the very least. I'm skeptical that there would be some ultra super secret ritual that's going to guarantee that you will "experiencing hell", but wouldn't it be cool if there was (provided the ritual didn't involve mutilating and severely damaging your body or some other shit).

I'm not saying that IQ=Intelligence, but IQ is a very useful measure of you ability to competently take in mathematical or verbal information and apply that information in complex ways. It's an advantage to have, especially if you're heavily interested in academia. I'm not an idiot but I'm certainly no genius either, and I don't know my IQ. The online consensus is that IQ cannot be increased, and that playing any "brain training games" only improves your competency in that particular game and in very similar games. However, this improvement stays limited to the task you practiced and has no effect on your baseline cognitive abilities. I found one random article claiming that IQ can be raised by meditation, but I have no opinion on this. Meditation certainly improves your focus and attention for studying. I'm not gonna remain depressed and bitter that I wasn't born with an IQ of 200, but having a high IQ is certainly a bonus.

@Elisabeth cool article, I'll probably check it out. It is unfortunate that I can't decipher sections 4-6. That most that can be done when you don't understand the maths is to just read the verbal descriptions of the equations and see what verbal conclusions they draw of those equations. Even a verbal descriptor like "wave-function" is rooted mathematically though, lol.

@Nahm I haven't taken psychedelics, although I plan to at some point in the future. Have you taken psychadelics before? When meditating you can get really attuned to the present moment and feel connected to "God"(or whatever you want to call it). You become aware of the fact that all your thoughts and feelings come from a "void" in the sense that you don't know where these thoughts and feelings come from. Think about how you can't control what you think, because that requires being able to think a thought before you think it. Your whole reality "just is".

@Outer @MM1988@Leo Gura (I'm on mobile and the website won't let my delete the three blue usernames) Well this thread's been fun to read lol. I've only seen part 1 of Leo's Quantum Mechanics videos, but I'm pretty neutral to his assertions about the implications of QM since I don't know much about QM. I think materialism is an ultimately a groundless assertion about reality, but I don't see how QM can be used to debunk it. I think QM can (perhaps) be incorporated into a materlistic paradigm. A materlistic point of view asserts that our reality just consists of matter and energy (although, matter is a form of energy according to Einstein). A better way of describing materialism would be the belief that all phenomena in reality is the result of energy/matter configurations in space and time, although it is possible that there are "higher" things in which space and time are nested in. Whether scientists will try to explain away space-time as another form of energy itself, who knows. In terms of QM experiments, although the traditional layout of the "double slit experiment" is very simple to understand and is very mind boggling, it is not the best experiment out there at showing just how awesome QM is. In the traditional layout, a person can argue that it is not "observation" that collapses a wave function, but it is the way in which we physically interact with said photon/electron/whatever to make the observation that causes it to act like a particle rather than a wave. But the "delayed choice quantum eraser experiment" really eliminates that doubt, and once you hear about it it raises so many questions. This experiment seems to indicate that human knowledge/awareness alone of the possible paths that a photon can take affects how the photon behaves. The intracaseis of this discovery is something I do not know. Human consciousness is linked in some way to all of this. However, if consciousness is in essence a particular matter-energy configuration as is the behaviour of a (photon) /(anything), then there can be some properties of consciousness which we do not know of that are affecting the behaviour of photon. Perhaps a materlist could argue that there's some hidden form of energy beyond perception in the universe which is responsible for all these phenomena, and this hidden form of energy is linked to our consciousness. Such a thing would be pointless though. The way in which a materlist could defend his position given the fact that human knowledge/observation and the "external world" are linked in such a strange way would depend upon the very specific details of these phenomena. If I was studying this, I would try to think of loads of creative ways to study how human observation plays a role in the behaviour of the external world. Without knowledge of the specifics of these QM experiments I think it is unknown whether QM can be incorporated into a materlist paradigm. Finding the specifics necessary is perhaps not too hard, but I myself haven't done so. If there's any take way from what I've wrote it would be to look into the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment, it's really interesting. Don't take my explanations of QM too seriously, Im just using this post as a testing board for some ideas.

I'm curious as to whether raising one's consciousness is directly related to empathy increasing. I've naturally been an unempathetic person throughout my life, although that may have a significant chance of changing since I'm 17. Although I'm unempathetic, I still see myself as someone who's relatively moral compared to the people around me. I've been practicing mindfulness meditation for a couple of months now, and whenever I'm in a state of higher consciousness, I will feel more connected to the people around me. This connection doesn't really feel as though its based on love and emotional attachment. The enhanced connection I feel is similar to the enhanced connection I have to the raw sensations in my body. I simply appreciate other people for the experience they give me. During states of higher consciousness I've felt happy and blissfully, but doesn't make me anymore "caring of people". I sense there is a lot of shadow work I need to do, as I think I have some sociopathic traits. I'm not a fan of manipulation and acting fake however. If I was to speak in terms of the Big Five Aspects Scale, I'm 0th percentile conscientiousness and 1st percentile agreeableness (I got an official test). Would it not be for the fact that I'm high in "openness to experience" (97th percentile) and like to discuss interesting deep topics with people, I would likely have zero value to people. The only value most people see in me is my interest in academia and topics like maths or philosophy. If one or two things were different, perhaps I would have engaged in criminality. I have a family history of mental illness and personality problems, and I think that plays a role. Or maybe I'm just playing the victim when I say that. Even if my natural temperament is geared towards low empathy, I still need to orient myself better to be happy. My question What have your experiences been with consciousness work in relation to how you feel about others? I'll say it again, just to highlight my experience. I'll feel more connected to people, but it's not because I've become more emotionally invested with their well being.

@Leo Gura sounds like good shit.

I will not be lol. I live in the West Midlands so it's out the way, plus I'm not hugely into politics. Muslim communities and non-Muslim communities in Britain have different interests and different ways of seeing things, and this has led to some problems. When you have large numbers of people from different cultures entering a country of a different culture, it is fairly obvious that this difference in culture existing between people in a country will lead to conflict. This conflict can be physical, political, religious and etc. What I'm not saying however is that western countries should stop immigration. I've found this good video on YouTube, it presented a lot of facts

@MarkusSweden A white genocide in Europe/America is extremely unlikely to happen within the foreseeable future, so there's no point in worrying about it. This trend of anti-white racism is not going to evolve into genocide. Look at societal attitudes towards human rights and violence. You may get a significant amount of racial violence, but it wouldn't be "genocide". But racial violence is still a problem. So you want to know what to do if someone tries to kill you? You use force to defend yourself, or run away. Pretty simple, no?

@Amit Try meditating before you go to work.

As far as consciousness work goes I've just been meditating for a couple of months now.I decided to read a bit of the Quran recently out of curiosity, since I'm a non-believer who was raised in a Muslim family. I'm also relatively familiar with the Quran due to having read it at various points in my life, with varying beliefs I had at the time of reading it. I'm just gonna talk about my thoughts on my own "non-dual" intepratation of the Quran. The Quran likes to talk about how those who commit themselves to God are ultimately on the right path and will be rewarded, and those who reject God will only find misery in hellfire. If we take "God" to be the "absolute" (or whatever word you want to insert here) , the nothingness from which everything comes from in your perception, then a take away from reading the Quran might be the idea that those who make a commitment to connect to the absolute (whether it be through yoga, meditation, devotion and etc) will reach heaven, a peaceful state of mind. However, those who are not mindful of and are ignorant of God will ultimately end up going through unbearable suffering (hellfire) as a result of them not connecting to the absolute. People will be trapped in suffering as a result of them not connecting to the absolute. I don't have many thoughts as to what the morality preached could mean. Perhaps the Quran is also trying to say that being charitable and doing other "good deeds" is a way to connect to the absolute, whilst doing "bad deeds" like adultery distances you from the absolute. However, the worst sin you can do in Islam (from a non-dual intepratation) is to not acknowledge that the absolute is there, and to not try to connect to it. A fundamentalist would call this sin "shirk". Shirk is the rejection of the fact that God exists, and that there is only one God. You could interpret this as meaning that the chief sin you can commit is to not recognize that all is one and that there are no boundaries between things, an ultimately non-dual teaching. Provided we are going with a "non-dual" intepration of the Quran, then we ultimately find the Quran is just repeating the same message, over and over again, since it keeps on talking about heaven and hellfire.The Quran likes to emphasise heaven and hellfire to tremendous degrees, more so than the Bible on a whole in my opinion (depends on which part of the Bible as well as though). Whether or not my intepration is separate from the authors' intent or not is unknown to me. Whatever the case, it was entertaining to read. My take away from the Quran is this: those who make the effort to connect to the absolute will find peace, and those who don't try to connect to the absolute will find misery. This is why it's important to set practices in place to connect to the absolute (Muslims like to pray for instance). So what do you make of religious scriptures? I feel as though that the Bible and Quran can only be seen in this light if you already have non-dual ideas about reality. The word "God" has different meanings to people, and it's ultimately a verbal semantic game when it comes to what you make of it. Given the fact that from a non-dual intepratation the Quran repeats the same message over and over game, it perhaps stands to reason that the Quran was written to be interpreted in the way that fundamentalists do so. But an argument about that would ultimately require an examination of history. Anyway, thanks for reading. And if anyone has a non-dual intepratation for what "Judgement Day" (the day when the world ends and every is either thrown into heaven or hell) signifies, I'm all ears.

@Leo Gura I'm glad you're making a video on this. Although there is a lot of misinterpretation as to what the plausible (plausible by the standards of "science") intepratations are of Quantum Mechanics, I trust you won't botch the job of explaining its findings and implications. I was looking at the "delayed choice quantum eraser" experiment the other day and it blew my mind. I'm hopefully gonna be studying physics next year at university, so I really enjoy this stuff.

@Nahm yeah I agree. The description of God in those texts is not an attempt to convey non-duality. It's your typical "there's an invisible man in the sky who cares who you sleep with" depiction of God, a belief which many people vehemently cling to at the expense of their spiritual grow. Stage 4 in Spiral Dynamics might ring a bell to you. There might be some wisdom to extract from these books, but the way to do it would be fundamentally different to the way how most people do it. The way in which these texts "teach non-duality" is very indirect, and is arguably completely wrong at times. Thanks for the advice to not get attached to one school of thought or one method of consciousness work. I should really be expanding my horizons. Funnily enough, I think I did Yoga accidently when meditating, cuz I was doing this stretch I made up for fixing my shoulder posture whilst meditating. After holding the stretch for a minute my arms were tingling with strange, but very pleasant, sensations. At that same time my mind quieted down a lot, and it felt really good.

I take the perspective that the desire to take a break from consciousness work can be simplified to be a function of your unconsciousness. Although I don't know whether at times you will make more progress by not doing consciousness work rather than by doing consciousness work. The only possibility that comes to mind for me is that perhaps after a lot of intense draining consciousness work, you need to take a break to let everything you've experiences be better assimilated into your psyche, and you need a break to rest your "mindfulness muscles". If you push yourself too far with consciousness work you might get an "ego backlash". Even if the desire to take a break is a function of unconsciousness, that doesn't necessarily mean that taking a break isn't sometimes good (? /.)

So I've been meditating for 2 weeks now for about 20 minutes every day, and I did 1 hour yesterday. I'm trying to address my internet addiction through being more mindful to cut down the amount of hours I'm using it (although I have a porn addiction which has possibly gotten worse recently). At the start of today I was feeling relatively normal. I have depression, but the extremely painful aspects of it have been negated through medication. After going on Netflix for an hour when I woke up, I stopped myself from using and I then meditated for 20 minutes. After meditating however, I was suddenly swept over with my depression with full force. I felt a perception shift (not in a good way). Articulating and verbalizing exactly what I'm feeling is very hard. I feel very unresponsive to my environment, and my mood is very low. I've had a lot of problems around in my mind which have only been growing whilst I distracted my mind with the internet, and they're starting to all surface and hit me hard. After that depressing feeling swept over, I've spent hours and hours on the internet . I went on an intense porn binge, and the aftermath has left me feeling much, much worse. When I want to direct my attention to my feelings and sensations, I cant focus and my mind just resists because paying attention to the feelings inside me would be very painful. When I'm feeling depressed like this, should I meditate? Even if it is extremely painful, and I can't focus well when I start my session, will pushing through be of any benefit in the short term and long term?

During meditation, we like to focus our awareness on sensations and thoughts flowing through our consciousness. But what really is awareness? Is it a type of thought? Is it possible to become aware of awareness? Or is that impossible?

Hey guys, I was just wondering whether you meditate when sleepy. Whenever I'm sleepy and trying to meditate, my mind gets lost in thought much more easily than it does than when I'm alert. Is it possible to completely overcome the sleepiness by being mindful of it? If you meditate with enough mindfulness, does your body natural become alert? Are the most hardcore meditators immune from the effects of sleepiness when meditating? I remember Leo talked about monks who could meditate for 7 days straight without sleeping.

Leo talks about how you can meditate without moving at all. Does that include not moving your throat to swallow saliva? I feel like if you don't swallow saliva you get a gag reflex which can't be controlled. Perhaps the gag reflex is there to prevent slaviva from entering your lungs.

I'll take that as a yes.

INTP master race.

@Leo Gura It is my opinion that you should remove the ranking system, it serves no utility if users already have an observable count of total reputation points. Whether you keep the profile records of total reputation points over time or not comes down to whether you want to maintain the current "social" hierarchy established on this forum. By keeping those records, you've created a forum where some people's opinions gain value not for their merit, but for the source of the opinion. Herd mentality is a powerful psychological trap. I think you should remove the record people have of total reputation points. And then there's the issue of whether you should remove reputation points all together for individual posts, even if a cumulative record isn't being held. I believe that you should remove reputation points all together, as herd mentality will mean that opinions will be valued by their popularity rather than by their merit. The popular opinion is almost never the best one, even on this forum.